There seems to be a consensus among AP Chemistry teachers that the test has gotten significantly easier than it was a decade or more ago. However, if we take a score of 5 to mean the equivalent of an A in a college gen chem course, I suspect that hasn’t changed. I think the bigger problem is that an A in college gen chem doesn’t mean what it used to.
From my perspective, what has changed for the worse is the ability of students to plan out solutions to problems that have several intermediate steps. As an example, just this morning I gave my honors chem I class the following thought problem—hydrazine is 87.5% nitrogen and 12.5% hydrogen by mass and has a molar mass of 32 g/mol. Based on this information, describe the intermolecular forces you would expect hydrazine to exhibit. The response I got was 24 pairs of wide eyes, like deer in headlights. So I coached them through setting up the problem in reverse. “What do you need to know in order to answer the question about intermolecular forces? Lewis structure. OK, what do you need to draw the Lewis structure? Molecular formula.” And then the light bulbs come on.
This is one of the problems with the NCLB testing paradigm that we’re stuck teaching under: the science and math tests are supposed to have a one-to-one correspondence with exactly one bullet item on the state frameworks, which means every test question requires only low-level thinking. In order to give students the best chance of success on these tests, teachers coach their students in quick, low-level responses, so they can get the right answer and move on. Elementary school kids no longer have to solve word problems. Middle school kids no longer have to model word problems as algebra expressions. High school kids no longer have to combine problem-solving techniques from different content areas in a single problem. As a result, our AP students don’t know where to begin when confronted with the terse, open-ended AP questions we were expected to solve when we were their age. College professors have repeatedly remarked that although standardized tests are going up, students’ level of preparedness for college work is going down.
Every year, I observe this continuing trend with my AP students—the more years they’ve spent under NCLB-inspired curricula, the worse it gets. Every year, they have less and less of a sense of how things fit together, and they resort more and more to grasping at formulas. At the beginning of this school year, when I asked my AP students to find the number of moles of solute in 1.5 L of a 0.2 M solution, every single one of them used the conversion factor 1 mole = 22.4 L, because that was the number they were all taught for converting moles to liters. Their brains jumped straight to the units, they found a formula that related them, and as far as they were concerned, that was enough to solve the problem.
In response to this trend, AP test questions have become much more heavily scaffolded. Students still have to be able to grind through the solutions, but they are now spared from the high-level thinking necessary to figure out how to organize a solution that might take several steps. I believe this, more than anything else, is why so many of us think the newer tests are easier.
Unfortunately, this problem has compounded over at least a decade or two. Reversing the trend would take agreement that the change is necessary, agreement about how to implement it, and a decade or more of patience while the kids work their way up from elementary school.
In short, the tests are getting easier because the kids are getting more stupid. The kids are getting more stupid because the teaching throughout K-12 is getting more stupid. If we want challenging AP tests in a decade, we need to fix the teaching now.
Originally posted to the ap-chem discussion list.
